Ethnobotany examines the relations between people and plants, tracing how societies classify, use, and ritualize vegetal life. Emerging from anthropology and botany, it situates plants within cultural, medicinal, and symbolic systems. The field destabilizes the idea of plants as passive background matter, instead revealing them as actors within economies, cosmologies, and everyday practices. Ethnobotany is both empirical and interpretive, combining taxonomy with lived knowledge. It illuminates how vegetal worlds shape and are shaped by human existence.
In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]
The inaugural lecture, given by Joost Emmerik when he assumed his position as Head of Landscape at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2022. The text particularly excels in embedding doubt into the teaching process. It is the doubt about nature, our entanglement with it, and the values and politics that drive the design process. It is about passing knowledge to others and questioning it meanwhile – a much more pertinent and productive teaching paradigm for times of uncertainties and change.
Del Tredici’s argument is that these spontaneous plants are “de facto native urban flora” considering the novel conditions produced by humans. It is an argument against perceiving spontaneous vegetation including invasive, non-native plants and plants considered as weeds, to be less worthy. Labelling a plant “invasive” or “weed”, says Del Tredici, gives people the licence to blame it for ruining the environment and to get rid of it.
Domesticated and genetically engineered organisms are usually overlooked by natural museums and institutions for cultural history. There is no space for artifacts such as dogs, chickens and corn. The Center for PostNatural History is the sequel to the natural history museum, and takes agriculture’s evolution as a starting point. CPNH focuses on the deliberate alterations […]
Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, and creator with a PhD from Goldsmiths University, focusing on natural history in art representation. His work examines depictions of flora and fauna to uncover societal values and foster shifts in these through critical reflection. Through publishing, curating exhibitions, delivering talks, and editing Antennae: The Journal of Nature in […]
Caio Reisewitz has created an artistic intervention in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, titled “Suspendre el Cel”. To Suspend the Sky is the artist’s reference to activists shamans Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, alluding to Indigenous practices and beliefs of Amazonian people that the earth is made out of the sky, so the sky […]
When we speak of Nature in cities, the question we want to stress is, is nature in cities natural or in fact an artefact? When we speak of natural processes, they of course take place but apart from spontaneous nature, left to random succession, emerging in spaces that Gilles Clément calls the third landscapes, there […]
Sarah Cowles of Ruderal presents their design for the Betania Garden near Tbilisi, Georgia, which was awarded LILA 2023 Special Mention in the Garden category. We start the discussion with an update on Arsenal Oasis, another LILA-winning project from 2021 (See the presentation). For the Betania Garden, the LILA 2023 jury wrote: At first glance, […]
We are thrilled to share with you the interview with LILA 2022 Honour Award winner Gilles Clément. The interview was conducted in Paris in November 2022 by Zaš Brezar and Joost Emmerik. The editors wrote in the award statement: Gilles Clément (1943) is a French landscape architect or better ‘paysagiste’, having a more garden design-related […]
Dr. Stephan Brenneisen from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences has been researching urban biodiversity and roofs for over 25 years. In a video presentation, he talks about his findings. We asked him specifically to speak about what to keep in mind when designing biodiverse roofs. What can landscape architects learn from his extensive experience, […]
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